I do think PornHub's label launch and competition to find an anthem is a PR stunt. But that PR stunt might spur the mainstream pop stars to go even further in their own videos.

Coolio - looking to re-ignite his career - signed a deal with PornHub to fund his comeback record. Nowadays it's OK for a Grammy-winning, platinum-selling, cookery show-starring rapper to sign a deal with a porn site and make an explicit video (which is actually only marginally more saucy than J-Lo's).

As more of these deals are done, expect 'mainstream' pop videos to keep getting racier.

The premise is ridiculously simple: add friends and send them a 'yo'. When you do, their phone will buzz and a cartoon voice shouts “yo!” That's it.

The interface is just a brightly coloured list of your friends' usernames. Touch one and you know that in a second or two their phone will let them know you sent them a yo. There's nothing you can do other than add friends and see how many yos you've sent in total. I've sent 335 (and only downloaded the app yesterday).

Yo has attracted publicity for its $1m round of funding and the fact it apparently got hacked so quickly. The majority of the hype has been focused on deriding it for being completely pointless. But is it?

Remember Facebook's 'poke'? It was a way for you to show a friend you were thinking about them without having to write or respond to something directly. It was quite liberating, but was quickly buried by Facebook's ballooning list of features, and then decommissioned altogether. It's all about the 'likes' nowadays.

Twitter's 'favourite' is close, but still requires you to respond to something. Path's the same, and so is Instagram. There isn't anything else that let's you just send someone a greeting, just a say you're thinking of them, without them having to do something first. A virtual doff of the cap. A friendly poke in the ribs. A cheery “yo!”.

Once you start yo-ing, it's addictive. You'll get a few back, then it'll go quiet. Then someone will yo you, and you'll yo back, and a wave of them will start all over again. My phone's in another room right now, and someone just yo'd me. It's a lovely feeling that's very bonding, and warming as the act itself is so selfless.

In a generation of swaggering status updates and immaculately filtered photos, the yo is a pure expression of what communication technology should be all about these days. It's the anti-selfie.

Far from being a pointless distraction, I think Yo is the purest and most giving way to use social media.
Don't believe me? It makes more sense when you try it.

Before you grumpily comment on this article saying how awful, annoying, or pointless Yo sounds, download the free app, add 'jonsilk', and send me one.

For so long, the secret of success in marketing has been differentiation. If you can’t differentiate on features, differentiate on services. If you can’t differentiate on services, differentiate on price. If you can’t differentiate on price, you’re stuffed.

As a result, every product or service we could possibly think of buying is now packed full of buttons and clouds and fingerprint scanners and gorilla glass and has a beautiful cross-platform app and a virtual office on the moon with 24/7 customer service staffed solely by hyper-intelligent supermodels who want to video chat with you. Oh, and it’s free thanks to being ad supported.

How can you differentiate against that?

I’m happy to tell you that you can’t. We’ve reached the event horizon of differentiation – there is no further you can go. Give up. Relax. Have a lie down. Your offering is now the best it can possibly be.

So, if the basic tenets of marketing are now redundant in a world where we’ve moved beyond the natural laws of marketing physics, what do we do next?

Luckily we’re already doing it.

Have you heard about the consumerisation of B2B marketing? If not, you will soon.

To summarise the concept for you, B2B companies are now using consumer marketing tactics in their campaigns – think stunts and celebs over research and whitepapers. It’s a trend that started with small businesses and worked upwards. At the root of it all, marketing is all about people, and businesses are made of people. So it makes sense.

The great news about consumer marketing is that it’s not about differentiation. It went through that change a long time ago. The Pepsi Challenge was probably the last consumer campaign that hung its hat on differentiation, and even that fizzed out in the 80s (probably when the campaign failed to actually work and Coca-Cola remained in the top spot). Nowadays it’s all about the talkability of your brand.

What do you do if you’re a B2B marketer wondering how to switch gears and adopt a more consumer-y approach to marketing? First of all, I’d recommend you listen out in your next meeting for these phrases: ‘Issues-based’, ‘market trends’, ‘research piece’ or ‘buying lifecycle’. If you hear them, you know your meeting is on the wrong track.

All that boring stuff is going to distract you from the job at hand. Stop relentlessly engineering your product or strategy to find the white space in the market that’s just begging for you to fill it up with stuff that nobody else is doing. Here’s a newsflash: There isn’t any white space. Everyone is already doing everything.

Instead, when you hear those words, stop the meeting, and throw out what I like to call an ‘idea grenade’. Here’s one: “To be honest, our product’s no different from our competitors. So let’s just give it away for free to Sun readers”. Or how about: “I’m not sure our CEO is the right person to front this campaign. How much do you think Kylie Minogue would cost?”

Those things might be out of sync with your message, but at least it’ll send you off in a more successful direction.